Any Man

by Amber Tamblyn

  I was getting drunk in my bedroom alone one night—I think I was sixteen by then. My mom would do searches of my room, looking for shit, but she never thought to check my old model car collection. The hoods could pop open on some of those joints, so I stashed my shit in there. And any liquor I’d put in a flask inside my homework binder. Anyway, I was getting drunk this one night, alone, and decided to sneak out. I ran down the street looking into the windows of other houses. I thought about going into one. Fuck it, I thought, I’ll just try the doorknob and see. Of course it was unlocked. Everyone kept doors unlocked in my old hood. I snuck in and looked around. Everyone was sleeping. It was a crazy feeling. Like, of power. That I could do anything I wanted, if I wanted to. All I did was grab a vase and run out as fast as I could.

  The dream.

  The long hair in the drain.

  The shrunken fly eyes.

  The swollen face with the fish teeth.

  The hands made out of wood.

  The fingernails with fur on them.

  The protruding spine that ran down her back and all the way down her legs.

  Her feet. Her feet like big men’s feet.

  A spider sitting in my lungs, building a web.

  I started getting better at stealing things. First jewelry and electronics, then cars and cash registers. I almost never got caught. If there was someone there, I would make them swear not to tell anyone, otherwise I’d come back and hurt them. I made them promise. My mom and dad divorced around the time I turned seventeen. They never had another kid after me. I was their only one and I was an embarrassment. I think they didn’t want another one, because of me. Why would you want to chance having something like me again? They couldn’t agree on what to do with me or how to fix me, so they just fixed themselves and called it quits. Quits meant they could finally take breaks from having to collectively raise me. That’s the fucking truth that divorced parents of fuckups don’t want you to know about. Mom could have a week off while Dad had me, then vice versa. I knew this is how they felt. Relieved. They didn’t need to say it for me to understand that the end of their marriage meant the beginning of happier separate lives for both of them. Just because they made one mistake didn’t mean they needed to spend the rest of their lives taking care of that mistake together. And so my anger grew stronger. My sadness. My demons went from renting to owning. I gave in.

  Don’t cry.

  I’m not going to hurt you.

  I just want us to have fun.

  I’ll be very gentle.

  When I was eighteen I attempted my first bank robbery. It was a small local bank, but I got away with it. At least for a few hours. Because I had no priors and no weapon during the robbery, they gave me two years in a state prison plus parole. My mom came to the sentencing. She looked hollow. She looked defeated. My dad never showed. I think I disappointed him most of all, you know? He was the saddest of all.

  I liked prison the first time I went. It felt safe there, and I was around other people who got me. We were all angry. We had all made one kind of promise or another, to someone or something, at some point. A promise that got us here. That led us to this point, to this place of no return. In prison I got my first tattoo on my arm. I got a tattoo of my favorite model car when I was a kid, Curtis Turner’s 1956 Purple Hog NASCAR Ford. See, I know a lot about cars. Especially racers. But more than the cars themselves, I know a lot about the men who raced them. I loved Curtis Turner model cars because I loved Curtis Turner. He was the only driver to win two Grand National races in a row. The first driver to qualify for NASCAR with a speed of over 180 miles per hour. The dude got the chance to work with the king of all mechanics, Smokey Yunick. The dude dreamed up, then built, the Charlotte Motor Speedway. He was . . . everything. Most of all, though, he was a comeback kid. Turner spent a lifetime trying to get more money and rights for drivers and formed a new labor union to support and protect them. The head of NASCAR at that time was a blood-hungry piece of shit who banned Turner and other drivers from NASCAR for life for unionizing. My boy went bankrupt. Became a drunk. Went dark and set up shop. But half a decade later, they lifted the ban and he was able to race again. And he had a major comeback . . . until his plane crashed in 1970. He was in his forties, I think. Crashed right here, in Pennsylvania, about an hour and a half from where I sit right now in this cell.

  Over the next two years in jail I got a lot of cars inked on me. 1982 DeLorean DMC. 1962 Volvo P1800. A Ferrari from the ’70s. A Pontiac Firebird Trans Am. I was going to get them all colored up and nice looking when I got out. Right after I got a job and a place to live. That’s what I was going to treat myself to. But I never really made it that far. I got out of jail on my twentieth birthday. I needed something to sell so I could make some money so I could get back on my feet. It’s hard to get work with a record, you know? So I broke into a house. I just wanted to grab some jewelry or something, wasn’t looking for trouble. I didn’t know anyone was home. I started going through some drawers and this woman comes up behind me and attacks me. Starts hitting me and all that. But man, she was small and I wasn’t—I’d been lifting weights in prison. Anger got the best of me, you know? Those demons. That promise. I threw her across the room. She hit the wall and fell to the ground. I looked at her, lying there in her nightgown.

  She was just a normal woman.

  She had brown hair and brown eyes.

  She wasn’t pretty. She wasn’t ugly.

  She wasn’t really old but she wasn’t young either.

  She was just a normal woman.

  Do you know who I am, I asked her.

  No, she cried.

  Good, I said.

  I’m not proud of what I done. What I did to her. Throwing her on the bed and doing those things to her. I didn’t mean for her to die. I swear to you. I just snapped. I don’t know what came over me. I was on top of her, and her face . . . I couldn’t shake the promise. I couldn’t unsee the nightmare. I felt like she was laughing at me, even though she was crying at me. I put my hands around her neck. Remembered the bathroom. Those hands on me. And I just lost it. I squeezed as hard as I could, until all the sadness was out. Until all the grief wasn’t there anymore. And when I was done, so was she.

  I PLEADED GUILTY TO MURDER. GUILTY TO AGGRAVATED ASSAULT. Guilty to robbery, to breaking and entering, to being a failure, a bad son, a piece of shit, a monster, a criminal. I pleaded guilty to keeping that promise. I got life without parole.

  LAST MONTH I ASKED MY CELLMATE, SAL, TO PUT SOME NEW INK on my neck. For the last two years I’ve been in here, I’ve thought a lot about what I’ve done and what was done to me. I’m still young, you know? I still have a lot of life in front of me. I want to change things, but I don’t know how to start. Wouldn’t know where to begin. So I asked Ronnie to put some names on my throat. I put my mother’s name, Lois. I put my father’s name, Jacob. I put Arthur’s name. I put Rezzy, for my child self and all that. I guess I was thinking they could hear me this way. They could hear me talking. And so at night I would talk to them. While lying in bed or whatever. I would talk to them. I would tell them things. Mostly that I was sorry. That I didn’t want it to be this way. That I wanted a different life and that I was sorry I hurt them along the way.

  I talked to my dad a lot. I could feel him there, on my throat, close to my voice. One night while lying in my bunk, I started talking to him, and I just said it out loud. I told him. I broke the promise. Said what had been done to me all those years before. My voice, man. I never heard my story out loud. And my voice just . . . closed up around the story. Like protecting it, or something. It burned. The words were just burning.

  I told him that he should’ve known. He should’ve asked. I told him he should’ve tried harder—when I was ten years old and fighting other kids but said nothing was wrong—he should’ve kept asking. Kept trying. He should’ve made me break my promise, you know? He should’ve done everything he could. Why didn’t you do everything you could, I asked him, lying there on my c
ot in the dark.

  A week later, the mail came and I had a package. I never get mail here in prison, so it was a nice surprise. Once in a while Mom writes and tells me how she is and tells me she’s worried about me and asks if I’m eating and all that. But this package wasn’t from my mom. It was from the name Fisher, somewhere in Delaware. I opened it and found a kit for a 1969 vintage original AMT Buick Wildcat, modeled in yellow. There was no note. Just the model car kit. But I knew it wasn’t from my mom because when they divorced she took back her maiden name, Miller. So it had to be from my pops, Jacob. Jacob Fisher. And it was. It was from him. He had sent me a gift in prison, after no contact for almost three years.

  I thought, you know . . . maybe he heard me. Maybe my dad heard me in here, talking to him. So I spent the next week putting the car together. It was a beauty, man. A beauty. You should’ve seen how gorgeous it was. I sent it back to him along with a letter. In the letter I told him what had happened when I was ten. It was the hardest thing I ever wrote. He didn’t write back. Instead, he just showed up. He just came straight here. He cried. Put his hand on the glass between us. He told me he was so sorry. Said I should’ve told someone.

  And so here I am. Telling you.

  Two

  CALLER, YOU’RE ON THE AIR.”

  “Hi Donald. My name’s Sebastian White. Non-listener, I’m afraid. But first-time caller, so that’s a plus! I’ve heard about your radio show, of course, but I’ve never listened because, well, I can’t really take the liberal-agenda to-do list, but I DO appreciate the work you’ve done for survivors like myself. Anyway . . . I don’t really know why I called in. You know who I am, of course. Don’t need to rehash all that. I was tagged on social media a few minutes ago by people telling me about the young man who just called in to your program. I was able to catch most of his story. And I guess I just want to speak to him, directly, if you don’t mind. If he’s still there. Ezra, I want to say something to you. I want to tell you how brave you are. It is not easy to be brave. This world discourages authenticity from infancy. It is not easy to do what you just did. It is not easy to just . . . speak. Or even to wait to speak, for that matter. I’ll tell you something . . . You know, I told many people what happened to me immediately. I told the world. I wanted the universe to know. I wrote books about it, spoke on TV, gave countless interviews, used my anger as a way to create action. I told myself . . . I told myself that she was nothing if I showed her through those actions that she didn’t affect me. That I was still the proud queen that I am. Get right back up, Sebastian. Get up and blow your worst enemies a kiss. And that’s how I’ve always survived, you know? I’ve learned how to make a meal out of pain, how to brand my sorrow. I don’t think I’ve ever said that out loud before.

  “I want to say to you, you know, I wish . . . I respect your silence. That you took the time you needed and . . . and I respect that. I envy that, really. I mean, I’ve done what I’ve done and I dealt with it the way I did but, in the end, here I am. Here I still am. You know? It didn’t help me, if I’m being honest. To write and talk about her so openly. It didn’t help me to push through everything like that. But you are brave, Ezra. And listening to you today has made me think a bit about things. How vague, I know! Sebastian White Thinks About Things! What a terrible title for a blog. Anyway . . . Who among us is not alone, Mr. Ellis? Which of us has forgotten her? None of us. Not one of us.

  “So thank you. That’s all. Thank you.”

  Three

  THE PROSPECT TIMES

  Opinion

  JANUARY 14, 2026

  AN INVOCATION

  BY DONALD ELLIS

  This is an opinion page, but what I’m here to say is not an opinion. It is an offering. It is a letting. A delayed release. An invitation to the beginning of who you are through the end of what you were. My name is Donald Ellis and I am not a survivor of rape. I did not survive. I perished before pushing through. I had to end before I could begin again. My name is Donald Ellis and I am not a victim of rape. I am an assault’s legacy. An embassy of expirations. I am the remnant of memory. Collateral debris. I am an earned epilogue.

  Ten years ago, I was having a beer with a friend after work and a few hours later, I was violently assaulted and left for dead behind a dumpster. No, worse—I was left for living. My assaulter wanted me to live through what I had experienced. It was a gesture of torture, a most excruciating gift. I became suicidal. I told myself I did not deserve love. My children. My wife. I was an isolation of shame. A pending avalanche. I was blood outside its body.

  Many times I have asked myself what I could’ve done to protect myself that night. I asked myself if I had deserved this. I convinced myself that I did, and it wasn’t hard to. I live in a country built on celebritizing its citizens’ grief and amplifying stories of violence and assault for political gain, click counts, or television ratings. Let me be emphatically clear: They. Don’t. Care. About. Us. People who live through sexual assault are a crash on the side of the road, and the American media is nothing more than cars slowing down just long enough to take a peek. Just long enough to take a picture before speeding off to their next fatality. We are a country that capitalizes on the fetishizing of felonies. A country that says “innocent until proven guilty,” even though the proving of assault is nearly impossible. Tell me how you prove coercion? How you prove the difference between being hit on and hunted? How you prove your arms were held down? Your body was touched? Your life was threatened if you ever told anyone? For people who have suffered violent sexual crimes, proof—the very act of proving—is more than just a burden. It is boundless bearing. An eternity of futility.

  I’m not one for witchcraft, but I believe in the power of spells. In the potential of many voices speaking at once in order to finally be heard. To force change upon those who are unwilling to do the hard work to help us. So if you were once left for living, like I was all those years ago, join me. Say it out loud with me now:

  I am in a body. It is not the one

  I came here with, but it is the one

  I’ll leave here in.

  I will take care of it. It belongs to me now.

  My pain, I will take care of it. It belongs to me now.

  My heart, I will take care of it. It belongs to me now.

  My story, I will take care of it. It belongs to me now.

  I experienced death

  but I am not a ceasing.

  These hands remain sorcerers.

  This mind contains many moons

  pulling gravities.

  Every memory is an ocean,

  every remembrance a tide.

  I have the right to recede.

  I have the right to swell.

  And though I am estranged from the sun,

  I am a brightness,

  lit from within.

  With this voice,

  I cast out the shadows.

  My forced curse.

  My executioner’s oath.

  I cast out the crime of me; my casualty.

  Silence, you must leave.

  Sadness, go.

  Surrender, shame.

  Cruelty, quiet now.

  Only light now. Flair now.

  Glow now. Radiance now.

  Beam now. Blaze now.

  Spark now. Gleam now.

  Grow now.

  I stand with you as you stand with me,

  A mending before us and between us.

  This body is my own. It belongs to me now.

  My pain, I will take care of it. It belongs to me now.

  My heart, I will take care of it. It belongs to me now.

  My story, I will take care of it. It belongs to me now.

  Ending, elapse.

  Beginning, come.

  X

  One

  EDWARD_DISPATCH: Hi Maude, my name is Edward Altman and I’m a reporter for the Dispatch newspaper. A former journalist for the Dispatch by the name of Joshua Greenfield reached out to you for comment almost a decade ago
, and while he no longer works for the paper, I wanted to circle back now that so much time has passed and see if you would like to give us a statement or comment regarding the recent allegations of Ezra Fisher, who came forward with a physical description of you, which has, of course, reopened the case.

  Is there anything you’d like to share with the public, Maude?

 

  Yes. Look closer.

  EDWARD_DISPATCH: Oh . . . You’re here. You responded Hi. Hello. Look closer at what?